http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120906092059.htm Well, I think it's fascinating. It seems like such a simple change(compared to other theories). Very excited to see if this is proven to be true or false.
This sounds quite interesting. Often things we consider fundamental are proven otherwise at a later date when new theories come along. Shame that proving it requires an advance in technology the same as other GUT's Is it me are has our understanding of the universe not advanced any in 100 years?
I was under the impression they have found a "higgs-like" particle, not the boson itself. Saying that finding a "higgs-like" particle does show the standard model to be flawed once again (like neutrinos with mass ). Finding these things is one but we are far from understanding why/how they exist, thus the physics isn't really advancing.
I thought the higgs boson was reported to exist with a 5 sigma probability. Meaning that the likely hood of the a false positive from their experiments is one in 3.5 million. Thats close enough for me.
Stepping in here. When CERN announced they'd found the Higgs they described it as "Higgs-like" because there is always the possibility that the particle found is a super-symmetric "cousin" of the actual Higgs boson, if you will. In other words the Higgs exists and we know it does we're just not 100% sure the Higgs we have is the Higgs we need. They won't know for sure until they've confirmed more data against what they expect the actual Higgs boson to express, a simplified explanation but i think it describes the issue. Further on from that, you can't go from discovery to utilisation in weeks. For example, if a method for full artificial gravity as seen in the likes of Star Trek et all is discovered tomorrow, you can't expect Nasa/Lockheed to bring something to market that uses this method in a couple of weeks you're talking months and years for R&D and implementation.
well the point is, I think our understanding of the universe moves continuously. The only problem is you need freakin hadron colliders in order to discover things. You can't discover physics on your desktop any more. So perhaps the rate of discovery has slowed as bigger and more complicated experiments need to be designed, constructed and financed but I don't think it has stalled.
The particle colliders do the heavy work - collecting the data from high energy particle collisions. Once CERN has the data streaming in, most of it is filtered out straight away, and the rest is sent around the world for processing. There is a LHC@home project that puts your computer into a distributed net ready to accept work from CERN, so actually, you can help make science with your own computer.
I am just pleased our reality wasnt instantly discontinued when they did find the Higgs or Other Particle, I have become accustomed to our reality and would like it to remain thus, abeit with cheaper petrol please.
Depends what you mean by understanding. As a great man once said, "As the island of our knowledge grows bigger do do the shores of our ignorance."
Its you. Here's some brief highlights of the last hundred years of physics (Stolen from Wikipedia, and I deleted the biology ones like DNA and so on). Note that the list also doesn't include the discovery of many of the fundamental particles... 1913 – Niels Bohr: Model of the atom 1915 – Albert Einstein: theory of general relativity – also David Hilbert 1915 – Karl Schwarzschild: discovery of the Schwarzschild radius leading to the identification of black holes 1918 – Emmy Noether: Noether's theorem – conditions under which the conservation laws are valid 1920 – Arthur Eddington: Stellar nucleosynthesis 1924 – Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle 1924 – Edwin Hubble: the discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies 1925 – Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics) 1927 – Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics) 1927 – Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang 1928 – Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics) 1929 – Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe 1929 – Lars Onsager's reciprocal relations, a potential fourth law of thermodynamics 1934 – James Chadwick: Discovery of the neutron 1938 – Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann: Nuclear fission 1948 – Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson: Quantum electrodynamics 1964 – Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig: postulate quarks leading to the standard model 1964 – Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: detection of CMBR providing experimental evidence for the Big Bang 1967 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discover first pulsar 1995 – Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz definitively observe the first extrasolar planet around a main sequence star 1995 - Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle attained the first Bose-Einstein Condensate with atomic gases, so called fifth state of matter at extremely low temperature. 1997 – CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab: Top quark. 1998 – Gerson Goldhaber and Saul Perlmutter observed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. 2012 - Higgs Boson is discovered at CERN (confirmed to 99.999% certainty)
